Liberals are Believers: Young People Assign Trust to Social Media for COVID-19 Information

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged existing health communication strategies as more people turn to social media as a primary health information source. Although many studies have explored how young people use social media, this study examined how sociodemographic factors and political ideology are associated with use and trust in social media as a source for COVID-19 information among young adults, and how use and trust in social media as a COVID-19 information source are associated with their beliefs about COVID-19. In Spring 2021, an online survey was conducted among 2,105 18–29-year-old students at an urban university in California. Our findings show that younger, female, non-binary, Asian, and Black/African American students are most likely to obtain and trust COVID-19 information on social media. Results also suggest that liberal students are more likely to turn to social media as a source for COVID-19 information compared to conservatives. However, conservative students who use social media as a source for information were more likely to believe false health information about prevention measures and the vaccine and to have lower perceived effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention behaviors and vaccination compared to liberals.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the students who completed our survey, the University of San Francisco office of Health Promotion Services, and the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions for incentives and support for student recruitment. We also thank the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval and informed consent

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects at the University of San Francisco, protocol #1539. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.